Introduction Writing unit tests is something beginners and seasoned engineers alike typically put off for later phases of development, yet – they’re key to stable and robust software development. The basic premise of test-driven development (TDD) is writing your tests even before you start coding. That’s a great goal to strive for, but it takes […]
Introduction Data can be represented in various forms – and a convinient way to represent dates and times are strings. However, to work with these dates and times in an arhithmetic fashion (such as calculating time differences, adding or removing time, etc.) – we need to convert them to a datetime object. One of the […]
As a software engineer that lives too much of his life on a computer, I like keeping my machine as clean as possible. I don’t keep rogue downloaded files and removes apps when I don’t need them. Part of keeping a clean, performant system is removing empty directories. To identify empty directories, I use the […]
Introduction As a developer, one of the things at the top of your list ought to be shipping bug-free code. Nothing could be worse than finding out on Thursday night that the changes you made on Monday broke the live application. The only way to ensure that your app works according to both system and […]
One of the ideological sticking points of the first JavaScript framework was was extending prototypes vs. wrapping functions. Frameworks like MooTools and Prototype extended prototypes while jQuery and other smaller frameworks did not. Each had their benefits, but ultimately all these years later I still believe that the ability to extend native prototypes is a […]
Introduction The security of users and their personal data while using a web application is paramount. While this guiding principle has been acknowledged even from the early stages of web development – bad actors find loopholes in applications, and may exploit your users. Many “standard” attacks are well-known and documented, and protection from them isn’t […]
I’ve been writing a bunch of jest tests recently for libraries that use the underlying window.crypto methods like getRandomValues() and window.crypto.subtle key management methods. One problem I run into is that the window.crypto object isn’t available, so I need to shim it. To use the window.crypto methods, you will need Node 15+. You can set […]
The United States is one of the last bodies that refuses to implement the Celsius temperature standard. Why? Because we’re arrogant and feel like we don’t need to change. With that said, if you code for users outside the US, it’s important to provide localized weather data to users. Let’s took at how you can […]
Introduction The Random Forest algorithm is one of the most flexible, powerful and widely-used algorithms for classification and regression, built as an ensemble of Decision Trees. If you aren’t familiar with these – no worries, we’ll cover all of these concepts. In this in-depth hands-on guide, we’ll build an intuition on how decision trees work, […]
Creating a thumbnail to represent a video is a frequent task when presenting media on a website. I previously created a shell script to create a preview video from a larger video, much like many adult sites provide. Let’s view how we can create a preview thumbnail from a video! Developers can use `ffmpeg, an […]